ward
higher forms and wider powers, or toward increasing feebleness and
decay.

To understand them they must be studied in connection and causation.
Hence, the method of the ethnologist becomes that which in the natural
sciences is called the "developmental" method. It may be defined as the
historic method where history is lacking. The biologist explains the
present structure of an organ by tracing it back to simpler forms in
lower animals until he reaches the germ from which it began. The
ethnologist pursues the same course. He selects, let us say, a peculiar
institution, such as caste, and when he loses the traces of its origin
through failure of written records, he seeks for them in the survivals
of unwritten folk-lore, or in similar forms in primitive conditions of
culture.

Here is where Archaeology renders him most efficient aid. By means of it
he has been able to follow the trail of most of the arts and
institutions of life back to a period when they were so simple and
uncomplicated that they are quite transparent and intelligible. Later
changes are to be analyzed and explained by the same procedure.[12-1]

This is the whole of the ethnologic method. It is open and easy when the
facts are in our possession. There are no secret springs, no occult
forces, in the historic development of culture. Whatever seems hidden or
mysterious, is so only because our knowledge of the facts is imperfect.
No magic and no miracle has aided man in his long conflict with the
material forces around him. No ghost has come from the grave, no God
from on high, to help him in the bitter struggle. What he has won is his
own by the right of conquest, and he can apply to himself the words of
the poet:

"Hast du nicht alles selbst vollendet,
Heilig gluehend Herz?" (_Goethe_).

Freed from fear we can now breathe easily, for we know that no _Deus ex
machina_ meddles with those serene and mighty forces whose adamantine
grasp encloses all the phenomena of nature and of life.

The ethnologist, however, has not completed his task when he has defined
an _ethnos_, and explained its traits by following them to their
sources. He has merely prepared himself for a more delicate and
difficult part of his undertaking.

It has been well said by one of the ablest ethnologists of this
generation, the late Dr. Post, of Bremen, that "The facts of ethnology
must ever be regarded as the expressions of the general consciousness of
Humanity."[13-1